


an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam

by PhoenixFalls



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: BDSM, Backstory, Canadian Shack, Developing Relationship, F/M, Interracial Relationship, POV Character of Color, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Praise Kink, Pre-Canon, Service Submission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-01
Updated: 2014-08-01
Packaged: 2018-02-07 02:42:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1882038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixFalls/pseuds/PhoenixFalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick Fury was just about done with this being homeless shit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thingswithwings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thingswithwings/gifts).



> So. . . this isn't the pairing we matched on **at all**. But your request mentioned 'Nick Fury/Maria Hill D/s where he tops' + 'food and caretaking' + 'good people who want to be good to each other' and suddenly I just had to write Fury missing Maria's service submission while off in Europe post- _The Winter Soldier_.

Nick Fury was just about done with this being homeless shit.

He’d gone soft since becoming Director, gotten used to having a home base to return to no matter how much traveling he was doing. Gotten used to having a space where he could shed the leather trench, let his shoulders slump and just breathe for a bit. Gotten used to someone being there to take care of him.

He caught a few hours of sleep at a time in anonymous motel rooms, in harness on transport planes, in fucking tents on the hard-ass ground and he yearned for the comfortable life he thought he had earned the right to enjoy. He felt every day of his sixty-five years and here he was again working in the literal rather than metaphorical shadows. Fieldwork. Fuck it. He was done.

Or maybe he was just fed up with having to clean his guns for himself again.

* * *

They had sex long before Maria began her service to Nick.

It happened before Maria came to SHIELD, when she was a hard-eyed young Marine Staff Sergeant in charge of security at the U.S. Embassy in Vancouver. Nick was the new Deputy Director of SHIELD, in town to glad-hand a member of the World Security Council. It was the sort of trip Nick should have been able to sleepwalk through.

So of course barely an hour on the ground everything was FUBAR. Nick had been forced into a shootout just outside of Burrard Station, and the man he was scheduled to meet had disappeared, presumably kidnapped.

Maria – still SSgt. Hill to Nick at that point – salvaged the situation with her keen eye for detail and her solid command of her squad. At the end of a very long day, Nick was making the calls necessary to start the process of poaching her for SHIELD when she knocked on his hotel room door, scrubbed clean of blood and rubble and wearing civvies.

Her hands were loose at her sides, but she still looked like she was standing at parade rest, feet and shoulders square, jaw raised. Her eyes were cool as they met his, but Nick caught her very subtly biting the inside of her cheek.

“Colonel Fury. This is completely out of line, so if you say no I’ll leave immediately and wait to be NJP’d. But if you say yes, I’d very much like to have sex with you.”

There was only one answer to that. They didn’t make it to the bed.

* * *

Nick didn’t sleep with people under his command, so when Maria put on the SHIELD uniform he wrote that night off as a one-time thing. It was easy; he rarely saw her during her first years with the agency, just heard her name in passing as she burned up the ranks.

Then in November of ’03, Nick and Maria found themselves in Canada again, part of the take-down of some second-rate secret base belonging to a terrorist group calling itself the Zodiac. Nick was there because they anticipated the group had access to highly classified information, and the Director and the WSC didn’t want anyone with less than Level 8 clearance handling it. Maria was second-in-command of the strike team.

The place was a shithole, two hours east of Yellowknife and half-buried in the middle of a pine forest, booby-trapped to hell and back. It wasn’t enemy action that separated Nick and Maria from the rest of the squad (and all their equipment) in a rapidly worsening blizzard; instead it was a combination of bad intel, faulty GPS, and a minor avalanche. Thankfully, their radios still worked, so Nick was able to follow the squad’s progress even as Maria broke a path through the deepening snow.

With the GPS unreliable and a quick retrieval impossible due to the storm, they were simply hoping to find some sort of shelter before they froze to death.

Nick was losing feeling in his toes when they stumbled into a clearing with a little log cabin at its center. He rubbed his hands together to warm them up in preparation for picking the lock, but the door opened with just a touch and they stumbled inside.

It was tiny, barely big enough to hold a double bed and a table, and a creaky door at the back proved to hold a rudimentary toilet. But it was out of the wind and well-insulated, so after taking that look around Nick settled onto the bed to get out of his wet outer layers.

Maria stripped down as well, radioed in an update and set up their homing beacon now that they were protected enough to stay in one place. Then she started to pace. At first it seemed purposeful, as she double-checked the door and windows to make sure they were as sealed as possible, then went through the barren cupboard up against the wall, producing a hand-crank lantern that she got set up on the table to push back the shadows a bit.

But quickly it became apparent that she just wouldn’t, or couldn’t, settle. The third time she went back to the cupboard, feeling the joins for a secret compartment, Nick had had enough.

“Hill.” He projected it so he would be heard over the wind battering the cabin, and it came out a bit like a bark.

Maria snapped to attention, straightening and turning to face him, hands going behind her back. Nick gentled his voice. “We’re gonna be here a while. Stand down.”

Her shoulders relaxed. “Of course. Sorry, sir.” She looked around the room again, then grabbed her pack and sat down at the table with it.

Now that she’d picked a spot, Nick kicked off his boots and stretched out on the bed. There wasn’t anything better to look at in the dim light, so he watched Maria as she disassembled her pack and began methodically checking her kit.

Her hands were nimble as she moved, her spine lithe as it curved over the table. The lantern cast the planes of her face into stark relief, cheekbones sharp and mouth soft and enticing.

It had been a while since Nick went out and got laid, and though it had been years he still had vivid memories of their first meeting and what happened after.

But just as he was thinking he needed a different line of thought or risk making them both uncomfortable, it became clear that Maria still wasn’t right. She came to the end of her pack, put it all back together, then just sat with her hands on her knees, every line of her body tense. It made Nick tired just to look at her.

Nick had never found that ordering a soldier to relax was an effective tactic, so he gave his next move some thought. Maria’s eyes were distant and she seemed oblivious to his observation. He thought back on her performance reviews and suspected she was going over everything that had landed them in this situation, teasing out what she could have done differently. It was the trait that made her so impressive, one of those rare agents who only made a mistake once, but he knew those thoughts didn’t make for pleasant companionship when stranded and left with nothing to do but wait.

So if she needed something to keep busy, well, Nick could give that to her.

“Hill.” Once he had her attention again, he leaned over the edge of the bed to push his pack toward her. “My gear.”

Normally Nick would have made that a request, especially with female agents, but he decided to trust his instinct.

“Yes sir.” She stood with alacrity to take the bag from him, no trace of irritation in her body or her voice. He settled back to watch her again, considering.

Their body heat had started to warm the air of the cabin, so Nick stripped off another layer of outerwear. Maria didn’t seem to notice, intent as she was on her task. The wind had quieted, and the only sound was the zip as she opened each compartment, the soft thud as each item was placed on the tabletop.

Eventually, she came to the end of Nick’s gear as well. There was something steadier about her now though, so Nick was content to watch and wait. She paused, looking at the reassembled pack, then walked it back over to lay on the floor by the bed. Without once looking up at Nick’s face, she picked up the clothes he had shed and folded them neatly, setting them in a stack on the spare chair. Then she grabbed his boots from their puddle of melted snow and set to work cleaning and re-waterproofing them with a rag and some wax from the cabinet.

Nick kept his breathing very quiet, something shifting in the air between them. When she finished with the boots and set them down neatly under his clothes, he couldn’t stop the quiet “Good girl” that welled up from somewhere in his gut.

There was a long moment when he thought he’d read everything wrong and he shrank inwardly from the conversation they would have to have next; but then Maria looked straight at him. Even backlit by the lantern he could see her pupils were blown, her breathing light and fast.

He pushed himself up, sitting on the edge of the bed with his knees spread. “Come here.” Completely silently, she walked in between his legs and folded down to a kneel. He brought his hand up to cradle the back of her neck firmly, tilting her head so he could meet her eyes. “You did good today. This fuckup is not your fault. You did everything I asked and more. I’m proud of you.”

All the nervous energy drained from her and she slumped into his knee, eyes slipping closed and only his hand keeping her head up.

Nick let her stay there for some time, fingers rubbing light circles into her skin, feeling out where there were knots and soothing them. After a bit he pulled her hair out of its ponytail and just pet her, smoothing down the flyaway strands.

When his back started to ache from sitting like that for so long, he coaxed her back to her feet to take off her shoes, then pulled her down to tuck her into bed with him. She fell almost immediately into sleep and Nick felt contentment like he hadn’t known in a while, watching her until the lantern flickered out.

* * *

Maria was promoted to Senior Agent shortly after that mission, and suddenly Nick was working with her regularly. He kept his distance, scrupulously professional even in inconsequential interactions, but it was harder now.

She didn’t need him. But he could see that tension that ran through her like a live-wire when she came off missions gone wrong, the way she went loose at a bit of praise, and his palms itched with the memory of her hair. It was infuriating not to be able to do something about it.

He didn’t realize she was watching him back until he got home after a hellish 30 hours of crisis management and found Maria in his kitchen, fixing him a plate of spaghetti.

She kept her back turned as Nick holstered his weapon and sat at his table, nonplused. When she had filled his plate with enough pasta to feed Barton, she turned to set it in front of him and raised an eyebrow at his wariness.

“I’m not much of a cook, but I figured you couldn’t be that picky, eating at the mess as much as you do.”

Then she slid to her knees to start unlacing his boots.

His feet probably stank but she didn’t make a face, just took the boots off in the direction of his bedroom once she got them off. When she came back she reached into his coat, careful not to get in between him and his plate, and unsnapped his holster to pull out his gun. Then she grabbed his supplies from the cabinet in the hall (making him wonder exactly how long she’d been in his house) and sat down across from him, methodically disassembling and cleaning his pistol.

Nick picked up his fork to take a bite. It wasn’t anything special – tasted like jar sauce with some ground beef and canned corn mixed in, plus a dash of tabasco – but he hadn’t come home to a hot meal since his momma died and he hadn’t even made it to the mess since the day before, so very quickly he was looking down at an empty plate.

This time when he said “Good girl” it was deliberate. He knew that by saying it he was agreeing to do this with Maria, despite his personal code and SHIELD’s regulations. But Nick was coming off a shit day after a shit month that was the third shit month out of the four so far that year, and Maria had come to him.

And the way her movements went languid after he said it was beautiful.

That night they both kept their clothes on, Nick changing into pajamas with his back turned, Maria taking a pair of his sweats and a t-shirt into the bathroom. They fell asleep entwined, Maria curled into Nick’s chest, Nick trailing fingers down her spine.

But he woke just before dawn to wet heat around his cock, and after he came Maria looked up at him with her usual forthrightness and said “Everyone thinks I’m fucking you anyway.”

* * *

Nick had been hunting traitorous SHIELD agents for three months when he got shot. Again. Jasper, the bastard, had him loaded on a plane back to the States while he was too high on painkillers to protest.

Maria was waiting for him on the tarmac, suit as crisp and official as her uniform had always been. “Are you done with your penance, sir?”

Nick snorted. “It wasn’t penance.”

Maria raised a sardonic eyebrow. “Of course not.”

“What’ve you got for me, Hill?” The question came out more plaintive than Nick intended, but Maria ignored that, starting in on her briefing.

Everything felt right again with Hill walking at his shoulder, her steady voice in his ear, bringing him up to speed on what he had missed. He took a look around to ensure they were alone, then brought his hand up to grip the back of her neck, pulling her close so he could whisper in her ear.

“Thanks. You’re so good for me. My girl.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Edgar Albert Guest's poem "Home," just because.


End file.
